6 MISTAKES I’VE MADE IN THE PAST 2 YEARS THAT CAN SAVE YOU $10,000

When I first started this blog I was a fresh new grad who thought he knew it all.

I still think that and if anything I should have listened to myself instead of doing the dumb things I did where I lost money.

Nevertheless, like I always say if you haven’t changed the way you think about things one year to another then you might as well have been dead. I’m constantly changing my opinion about things. Its part of growing up and you should all be doing that. I have a new idea every month or a paradigm shifting thought.

It’s like clockwork with this shit.

I get a lot of ridicule because some of my ideas for lack of a better word are just dumb. However I never judge my own ideas because you never know, it just takes one. I’m sure there were plenty of people who thought renting out your house to strangers on the internet was an absolutely ridiculous idea. Now look who is laughing.

From the day when I first started my blog here are 5 mistakes that I made which you should learn from to save $10,000 and a couple of years.

1) Trying to beat the stock market

In one my blog post I wrote “Don’t try to be beat the stock market” and I emphasized that fact over and over again. So what do I do?

I lose close to $10,000 playing options. Options are literally the riskiest asset you can possibility buy. It’s actually similar to play roulette with worse odds. You see with stocks, they have 3 possibilities; they either go up, down or stay the same. When you buy stocks, you only lose money when the stock goes down but when you buy options you lose money if the stock goes against your call OR if it stays the same. So you literally have a 1 in 3 chance in making money.

The thing about options is though; if you’re right then you can make a lot of money.

If you’re lucky.

So here’s what I would do if I could do it all over again.

“DON’T TRY TO BEAT THE STOCK MARKET BY BUYING OPTIONS OR INDIVIDUAL STOCKS”

Stocks fall as hard as they rise and it’s tough seeing a stock that you want to buy rising every day and hitting new highs knowing that was your stock. But they fall just as quickly as they go up and it’s just not worth chasing them.

I now know this fact for sure.

2) Chasing money

This goes back to my first point; I lost money in the stock market because I kept chasing the big win instead of being slow and steady.

But I’m not all regrets; I don’t want to be rich when I’m 50 or 60 by saving pennies and trusting my money to the stock market. I don’t feel like that Lamborghini is going to be as much fun to drive en route to my hip replacement surgery.

I rather be driving that Lamborghini in my 30’s with two high priced escorts and snorting blow off their breasts.

I took a risk with money to try and get rich for that life. It didn’t work out.

That’s fine.

I learned a much more valuable lesson in the process. If you chase money; it’s like holding water in your hand.

The harder you squeeze at it, the faster it slips out of your grasp.

Instead of chasing money create value and try to solve big problems. Make other people’s lives better in any way you can and I don’t mean the pussy stuff like be nice to people.

I mean figure out what their problems are and solve it. Provide value. You will get paid a lot more money and with a lot more certainty if you can make people’s lives better.

If you’re looking for problems to solve then look at stuff that frustrates you in your everyday life and think of a way to solve that.

One quote that I really like is:

“The size of your life will be determined by the size of the problems you choose to solve”.

We all have 24 hours in a day. You, me and Elon Musk. The difference is Elon Musk decided to solve the problems of online payments, electric cars and space travel. He still only has 24 hours in a day but he’s a multibillionaire and the real life Tony Stark.

While we are over here figuring out how we are going to get our first job out of college.

3) Buying a car straight up cash is dumb (for some people)

I remember in my previous post about how taking out a loan is the most retarded thing a human can do.

I was wrong.

As the months went on I realized that people with money and business sense don’t buy out a car with cash. That’s a waste of hard earned cash. I know this goes against what many “personal financial gurus” talk about but let’s consider things for a second.

When you buy a car with cash you are literally taking away money from a liquid form to a highly illiquid place in the form of a depreciating car.

There’s a little thing called “opportunity cost” which people almost always seem to forget (me included).

That money can be used for all sorts of investments and provides you with the opportunity to do something with it rather than sticking it in a car.

What I like to do is finance my cars as heavily as I can with 0% APR loans provided by credit cards trying to win your business. My credit cards (except AMEX) are always sending me random offers of 0% APR for a year if I do a balance transfer.

They tempt people with these offers because they hope people will miss a payment and will be responsible for the full 20%.

Not with this dead beat. I pay my bills every month and if for whatever reason I didn’t get paid that month I still have access to my cash reserves.

Either way though, the moral of the lesson is that financing or leasing a car is not that bad. However if you don’t know any better than you should pay cash.

Or better yet, learn so you know better so you can stop being such a peasant.

4) Real estate investing isn’t the devil that I made it out to be

I have to admit something. Even after writing my article on how real estate is a terrible investment I went out and bought a downtown condo.

I’m not ashamed of it.

Like I said earlier, if you aren’t growing and challenging your thoughts you might as well be dead because you’re a useless human.

We as humans take mental short cuts and one of the most prevalent ones is “Confirmation Bias”.

Confirmation Bias: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.

All the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) scientists and philosophers in history were aware of that and deliberately and systematically searched for information that went against what they thought.

It’s something we don’t do on a regular enough basis but I do. So I literally did everything I wrote that you shouldn’t do but I’m still right about real estate.

Except how I did it.

See what I did was try to break the rules in finding property and used Kijiji. And I landed myself by luck into a niche that is paying out handsomely. I have in only 4 months almost paid off my initial investment which included my down payment and stupid lawyer fees.

This is based on pure cash flow and nothing to do with speculation or how much my property is going to increase in value. I assumed zero percent appreciation in all my calculations.

Let’s see how long I can do this for.

5) Stop consuming all the time

You probably consume way more than you produce. Think about all the TV you watch, blogs you read, games you play etc. It’s nonstop consumerism.

You should produce something to keep yourself sane. This doesn’t apply as much to kids in school but when you enter the working world you should do something outside of work that adds to this world.

I write this blog to produce something. I know no one reads anything I say.

I don’t really care; it just helps keep me sane.

6) Learn copy writing

If there is any one skill that will greatly improve your life it’s going to be copy writing. Look at my previous blog posts and titles then compare it to this one.

I bet this one reads a lot easier.

Learn to write copy will teach you to be more attuned to others and learn human psychology in the process.

It’s also that reason that girls share those stupid Buzzfeed articles on my feed almost every single day. And the reason why I keep on clicking on them even though I hate myself afterwards for doing so.

Google Gary Halberts’s Boron Letters and get started sooner than later!

So there we have it. Be on the look out for my next article which where I discuss how to safely drive a Bugatti Veyron with multiple hookers in the car and a kilo of blow.